The Pursuit of William Abbey

by Claire North

  I had never seen Peadar Coman in action before, never stopped to appreciate him. He had just been a man in Margot’s shadow, and yet here he was, a rabble-rouser and a leader of men, grown older as I suppose we all had, pronouncing an end to tyranny. He was, in his way, magnificent, but as I hid on the street corner, between liquor store and funeral home, and listened to his oratory, all I could think was that where Coman was, Margot was never far behind. I pictured her in the houses of the rich, picking apart their secrets and their desires. In that moment, any sense of my mission or my duty was secondary. Seeing her was everything.

  Simply asking Coman was absurd. Instead, I followed the money, and found Margot in a smoking room in a hotel some three blocks from the station, where men in tall silk hats and expansive silk waistcoats sat in the blue fog of cigars and pronounced judgement on common sense and business, and gave orders that had room to be misunderstood.

  “Handle things quietly,” or perhaps, “See that he doesn’t cause more trouble.”

  They were all good people too, these men of wealth and industry. They were not responsible for the interpretations of their underlings, and in a way, by never saying out loud what they desired, they could convince themselves that they didn’t desire it at all. They went to church on Sundays, said grace at dinner, and only three of the five greatest there had been born to a silver-plated inheritance. They regretted that the working man didn’t understand market forces. They regretted that the working man didn’t understand how the real world worked.

  And there was Margot, dressed in green with white lace gloves and a parasol against her chair, laughing and smiling with some ageing lady of the house in her corner, some well-meaning missionary sort who had, during the Civil War, often thought about helping the black man in his fight to escape slavery, oh yes indeed she had, she had most definitely thought about it.

  For a little while Margot didn’t notice me, and that was fine, and I sat behind my newspaper and listened to her soul. It was such a natural thing to me, second nature, that it didn’t even occur to me until the moment she glanced up and saw the corner of my eye that this was a violation. I had spent so many years eavesdropping on the hearts of men that this blasphemy was nothing more than habit.

  And the truth of her heart was that she had become a believer.

  The woman I had met in Dublin, who laughed at her power and enjoyed the game – she was still there. But burning now beneath it all was a rage, an injustice, a passion that was if anything deeper and truer than Coman’s, for it was fuelled by having tasted the pain of the poor man starving in the street as if it were her own, and having listened to the hearts of great men who would never, ever understand.

  Margot Halloran believed in the battle she fought. And more than that, she had begun to believe that perhaps, in the manner in which she waged it now, it was unwinnable.

  Here it is now, here is the niggling edge of my doubt, the shock kicking in like a mouthful of snow.

  And the truth of her heart was that she had married Coman because it was convenient, and over time perhaps convenience had grown into something more.

  And the truth of her heart was that she had killed a man in Austria, and forgotten about it, because it was needful, and there was work to be done, and that not all battles could be fought with words. Was this not war?

  And the truth of her heart –

  – here it is, here is the reason she has kept Langa away from me, from her, for all these years, here it comes –

  – the truth of her heart is that she has a daughter, who has her husband’s eyes, and her daughter is six years old, and her name is Vhairi, and she is everything.

  She is everything.

  She is Margot’s world.

  And if Margot has to burn down the old to make her daughter something new, why then, she will set hellfire to the roots of the earth.

  Now, for the first time in almost ten years, Margot sat on the opposite side of the room as my shadow was drawing near, and I saw the truth of her heart, and she was fire.

  I think it was my shock that caught her attention, a ripple of something unexpected on the edge of her awareness. She looked up, and knew me at once, and the laughing, childish joy of secrets shared that was our usual silent conversation passed over her face for just an instant, before vanishing again. Then she knew Langa was near, and for a moment saw herself through my eyes, and there was no room for who she believed herself to be, only the horror of clarity as she saw herself in the gaze of another.

  Here we are, in that moment.

  Frozen with the cruellest mirror that will ever be made.

  And I see what Margot thinks of me, and she finds me amusing, and enjoys the thrill of illicit secrets and liaisons, and is perhaps even fond of me, and would be sad if I died, and hasn’t given it much thought beyond that.

  And she sees what I think of her, and knows that I love her, and knows that I can see the truth of her heart.

  Being seen, breaks it.

  Even now, I cannot precisely say whether her heart broke first, or mine; the truth melted together, like iron in the crucible.

  She stands, making a sudden, mumbled excuse. She is halfway to the door before I have closed my newspaper, and every fibre of her screams indignity, rejection, fury. This violation that has been forced on her, this knowing, this seeing, it is an insult unlike any she has had to endure. She wonders if she hates me, and isn’t sure whether she does, and knows as surely as I do that she most likely hates herself, almost as much as I hate myself, and that everything we do is a lie.

  Following her would be futile, an insult, but I try. She flows from the hotel in a cloud of trailing smoke, marches into the street, heading straight for the station, a retinue of ever-present watchers and guards slipping into her wake, sent by Coman, he trusts her, he doesn’t trust her, he loves her, he doesn’t love her – she’s given up on trying to make his choices simple. They block my way, funnel her on, leaving me behind, shaking, my world torn in two.

  Most people believe many things, all at once.

  It is simply the human way of things.

  Margot fled, and was on the next train out of town.

  I didn’t follow.

  Langa came, and for a little while I sat on the porch of the bootmaker’s shop as the sun went down, and decided to look him in the eye once more, and tell him that there was no one I loved and nothing he could possibly do to me, and I drank some more rum, and the idea lost its appeal.

  I moved on, outrunning the truth by locomotive train, reported back to my masters on the will of the mine owners and the miners, on their indiscretions, weaknesses, pains and truths. Told them that reason meant nothing to men who believed. That you could look at evidence until your eyes bled, but it was nothing next to a good story that tugged on the heart. That some things just needed to burn themselves out, and only pain could fix it.

  Headed to New York, travelling fast enough to leave Langa merely on the edge of my awareness, rather than a blazing intrusion into my thoughts.

  A ten-year-old boy drove the elevator up to my room on the sixth floor of the flashy hotel. His skin was the colour of winter earth; he wore a red cap, and had been trained to look no one in the eye, and not to ask for a tip. The money he was paid was not enough to live on, but he got two hot meals a day and by working six days a week he helped his mother pay for lodging, and that was all that mattered. Family was all that mattered. He would do anything to protect them, now that Pa was gone. So he stared ahead, and said yessir and nosir, and I tipped him a dollar, and he said thankyousir, and didn’t meet my eye.

  I slept in the roaring, barbarous city, listening to the trot of horses’ hooves and the sometime blare of a car horn as a new automobile driven by men in white scarves and black frock coats creaked and farted and frightened the beasts crowding the cobbled streets. The zip-up skirt was the latest thing for the discerning woman; X-rays were the newest thing for the quack doctor, who promised that you could cure yourself of any d
isease simply by zapping yourself three times a day. On the far side of the river, wooden shacks and crumbling warehouses lived in another century, still waiting for the electricity wars to bring their gifts. In Manhattan, the city blazed, making of the newest thing the latest trend, whether it worked or not.

  And at night, I slept, and dreamt the dreams of my neighbours. Another litany of shame, of tasks that could never be accomplished, of humiliation, of being lost, of being unable to fly, unable to walk, unable to swim, stuck, suffocating in invisible treacle. The odd dash of sexuality, the occasional flicker of ecstasy, broken by the cries of a woman who in her sleep has managed to kick out so hard she has pulled a muscle in her leg.

  I wake too, curling up in agony around her cramp, and put my slippers on and try to find something to drink in this place, which isn’t hard to do.

  The telegram was delivered to my door by a man with a tightly shaven black beard, the visage of a carrion bird and the eyes of a Venetian beauty. He wanted a tip, and I was too drunk and bitter to care. He hoped to get me for that, one day, but probably wouldn’t have the opportunity.

  It said:

  Come at once M STOP

  In all our years of secret liaisons and clandestine betrayals, Margot had never once telegrammed me. Perhaps if I hadn’t seen her heart; perhaps if Langa was nearer, or if I had better common sense, I would have stayed away. But idiocy makes its own bed, and I had well and truly made mine.

  I pulled on my coat and gloves, grabbed my medical bag, wondering if it might be some such emergency, thinking of her daughter, the unknown child, and went to find her.

  She hadn’t given an address, but there were a few places in New York we had met before, and it seemed certain I would find her in one of them. A drinking hole of Italian sailors; a woman who sold anything to anyone, and had in her upstairs attic nearly a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stolen goods that she might get round to fencing one day, when the winter was hard; a hotel in Harlem: “No sir, we haven’t seen Ms Halloran for nearly a year.”

  The sound of the city was iron on steel; new warehouses, new engines, new tracks, new girders, new bridges, new cables for the newest electric current, new roads for new vehicles, new nails in new boots prowling between the box markets and red-brick electricity houses. The speed of it all put crumbling tenements of wood and cracked glass against fine terraced houses where incandescent bulbs shone in the windows, pushed the new rich against the old poor, barefoot children running between governesses with lace umbrellas and high, bouncing prams. Old quarrels had split streets in two, as a Jewish family who once heard an Italian insult their religion whisper to their neighbours fresh come from the East that not a one of the Italians may be trusted, not a one; while an Italian grandfather remembered an insult given to him by a fellow from Sligo, and now has his children chant “Death to the Irish, death to the Irish!” even though not one of them has set eye on an Irish child.

  The hard wall of division is written large on every block. Outside the hotel hangs the sign: No dogs, no children, no blacks, no Jews – while on the street corner opposite a boy from Cuba too young to realise his error dares to smile at a child from Krakow and is hastily barrelled away.

  A flicker of drizzle turned into an on-off patter of uneasy, grubby rain.

  Just before dawn, I stumbled into the last place left. I should perhaps have gone there first, but I could not believe that she would send a telegram with such flagrant urgency, and yet be somewhere so grand.

  I found her in the Republic Metropolis Hotel, off 5th Avenue. It was her favourite haunt for grand dealings, a place of celebration after a successful blackmail, or when she had snatched a particularly juicy secret from a beating heart. The grand suite on the top floor was nearly eighteen dollars a night, and I had been invited to it only once, many years ago, when she had plucked the hidden treasures of a US cabinet secretary from his heart and spun such wealth from it that the unfortunate gentleman might have tried to sell Louisiana back to her to make her go away.

  It was a place for triumph, comfort and ease – not for urgent telegrams sent in the small hours of the night. Yet stepping through the door, shoes squelching, coat dripping a circle of fat rainwater on the floor, I looked across the sofa-padded, crystal-hanging hall to the reception desk and recognised, lounging with a copy of the New York Times, one of Coman’s endless bodyguards, dressed in custard-yellow corduroy and a blue blooming cravat.

  If he’d wanted to blend in, he was making a terrible matter of it, and as a bodyguard he was so poor that he didn’t even notice me as I marched across the lobby to the elevator, with the soaked-through swagger of one who owned both this place and every hotel south of Central Park.

  A vase of dried lavender was perched on a high table outside the grand suite. The walls were panelled in a French style, pale blue and white. The door handle was polished on one side more than the other by the erosion of hands pressing against the knob. I knocked four times, and Margot replied, “Who is it?”

  “William,” I called back, muted, glancing over my shoulder to check that the elevator was descending, that no one watched this exchange.

  A silence inside, then a shuffling of feet, a moving of body. The door opened, and there was Coman. His shirt was loose at the collar and sleeves, his braces hung down by his hips and he wore no socks. And the truth of his heart was that he knew precisely the nature of my relationship with his wife, and he despised me for it, but would never leave her, never let her go, never say out loud what he thought, because she must know it already. She must know that she was hurting him, and yet she did it anyway, and if she did it anyway knowing what she did, why then, she must need something from me that Coman could not provide, and he loved her enough to let her take that, no matter how much it hurt him. He loved her that much. He loved her to the subsummation of all that he was. He loved her when she injured him. He loved her when she ignored his pain. He loved her even though he sometimes feared that what he loved was a fantasy, not Margot Halloran at all.

  With so much love and so much pain, it was easy for him to loathe me. Standing not a foot away from him, his gaze fixed on mine, I knew it. He wouldn’t hurt me, because that would hurt Margot, but he prayed with every fibre of my being that I could see his contempt, and was satisfied to note by the look in my eye that I could.

  Then Margot was in the doorway behind him, wearing a purple evening gown, without jewellery or gloves, her hair hanging in a tangle of pins ready to be put up for the latest evening’s adventure. Pushing the door open a little wider to see me, her eyes widened in surprise.

  “William?”

  On some occasions, truth hits like a jump through frozen water; on others it is a nausea of sickness. In that moment, it was both, and no sooner did I know it than she did too, and her head jerked upright with the force of sudden breath.

  Then a third figure moved behind them. A child, still swaddled in puppy fat and the over-indulgence of her parents, with her father’s basalt eyes and her mother’s tilted chin. Vhairi, raised from the crib on her mother’s stories, her father’s revolution and the finest international travel that blackmail could buy. My eyes flickered from her to Margot, and for a long moment we waded in the truth of each other’s souls, and found them wanting.

  “You didn’t send the telegram,” I whispered, looking for words to deny the certainty I already knew.

  She shook her head.

  “What is this?” snapped Coman, all pretence of softness gone from him, pure old-country grumble.

  “It’s a trap,” I breathed. “They’re coming.”

  Margot was already moving, turning her back on me and striding into the room. Coman just stood in the door, not quite understanding, but his wife’s bark – “Peadar!” – jumped him back to dumb life.

  A child’s voice, protesting, complaining as Margot, trying to sound a little gentler for the girl, commanded shoes, now; coat, now. I heard the rattle of the elevator gate behind me, the thump of feet on stairs f
rom the other end of the corridor, and before Coman could protest, pushed into the room, forcing him out of my way, slamming the door shut and turning the lock. Margot was already halfway into a fold of coat, struggling with one sleeve while rummaging under the bed for a pair of shoes. Her handbag was open on the bed, a spill of coins and the gleam of a revolver glinting behind the catch. Coman grabbed a child’s jacket from a hook by the door, urging the girl inside it, while I dragged a heavy chair along the thick carpet to wedge beneath the door handle as the hammering began. They didn’t bother to call names or make threats; whoever was pounding foot and fist against the locked door knew precisely what they wanted, and negotiation changed nothing.

  Margot had a window open, a blast of cold, wet air and the sudden sound of the street outside, the slosh of wheels through dancing water and the percussion of rain on metal. There was no fire ladder, but the front of the hotel had been built in the overblown, cod-Greek style that so many architects equated with classical grandeur, and between half-circle pillars of painted concrete, a lintel ran just about wide enough to get a foot on. She hopped out without hesitation, and as the bedroom door began to crack, panels breaking in long, jagged lines, she reached out a hand for her daughter.

  Vhairi shook her head, urgent, begging.

  “Sweetheart,” murmured Margot. “Now.”

  She wasn’t cruel or brisk. They had talked about this possibility before. The end of Vhairi’s nose trembled, she snuffled back the beginning of tears, bowed her head and ducked out onto the lintel behind her mother, who caught her hand and held so tight her child flinched. Coman followed, one hand on his daughter’s shoulder, pressing her closer to the wall. I stuck my head out of the window, saw the street lamps below and the tumbling clouds above, and felt fairly certain that at least one of us was going to die in this escape. Then a voice called, “Abbey!” from the door, and a black-gloved hand had made it through the topmost broken panel and was flapping around, feeling out the shape of the chair I’d wedged against the handle. I slithered, graceful as a hernia, bum-first into the outside air, imagining feet giving out and clawing at nothing before falling to a six-floor splat below.